With the rapid growth of the Internet and the ever-rising demand of applications, building a highly scalable infrastructure is increasingly important. A peer-to-peer (P2P) system provides an infrastructure that may meet those demands, especially for storage systems.
A P2P system of nodes (or peers) interconnected via one or more networks provides a relatively convenient and scalable means for storing and exchanging information. However, current P2P storage systems offer a flat storage space, where no techniques, other than using distributing hash tables to store and retrieve objects, are employed for organizing data stored in the P2P system. Factors for optimizing storage systems, such as storage utilization and data organization, should be considered when building a storage system on a P2P system.